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Disney goes with Gowalla (not Foursquare or Facebook Places — as the official location-based social network of Disney Parks and Resorts. The startup has launched custom Gowalla Disney Passport pages along with over 100 virtual pins that... Read the rest of this post

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Obama’s gestures. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

President Barack Obama gave his first speech from the Oval Office last Tuesday. It wasn’t great, as most commentators have noted.

To begin with, the White House appears to believe that body language is presidential language. Our eyes were constantly drawn to the bottom quarter of the screen, where the president’s hands seemed to have taken on a life of their own. If our democracy has degenerated from deeds to words, we’re now becoming accustomed to gestures. Our great deliberative democracy, reduced to a series of hand flicks.

The words weren’t that good either. Even though the President was, understandably, trying to signal strength and decisiveness with words and gestures, he had to lace his speech with tentative caveats in a bid to lower our expectations about what can be achieved and how soon – another presidential goal on Tuesday night. As a result, the speech was wishy-washy, tepid and pointless. It looked and sounded like a damage-control skit, and the president looked like he had George Clooney’s PR job in “Up in the Air” – telling the American people harsh news and artificially sweetening the news with an a dose of saccharine.

Talking about enlisting scientists and experts doesn’t help when they can’t even agree on the size of the oil spill. And everyone can see that the purpose of telling the American people how serious the problem served, selfishly, only to tell us that the president feels our pain. It is gratuitous at best and condescending and worst. Empathy and euphemisms together do not eloquence make.

The administration was hoping for a game-changer in this speech. But not even the weight of his office was able to help this young, politically inexperienced president stave off the inflexion point he did not intend. From now on, it looks like there will be no more free passes from Rachel Maddow and the liberal media.

If Obama is our era’s Greatest Communicator, then perhaps the only good that came out of this speech is that we may begin to realize that no rhetorical wizardry can solve our nation’s crises. There is no messiah, and there is definitely no rhetorical messiah. Indeed, I would go one step further and hope that we all realize that eloquence is not the solution to our problems. Eloquence – our atavistic yearning for a grand orator, a Cicero who can inspire our nation into action – is the problem itself for it is a phantasm that too often has become a substitute for deeds.

The next time the president is in political trouble, and he has nothing to offer but damage-control dribble, then perhaps he shouldn’t say anything at all. Let the pundits and bloggers chatter, but lie low and just get down to work, for goodness sake. Sometimes, a measure of humility, in spite of popular expectations for presidents to speechify and to perform, can help a president ride out of a po

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Obama’s leadership. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

Presidents struggle to take charge when crises befall the nation. In the immediate aftermath of disaster, whether it be the terrorist attacks of September 11, Katrina, or a massive oil spill, Presidents Bush and Obama alike have been accused of being slow to take charge. Despite the conventional narrative that crises unite the country and cause us to rally round the flag, the truth is that the American presidency is not an institution to which we quickly rally around because we have unrealistic expectations of what presidents can and should do.

While it has become a presidential cliché to declare, Harry Truman believed, that the “buck stops here,” it never does. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the oil spill disaster in the Gulf. The reason why the cliché doesn’t work is that even if the president may have the will to take charge, he cannot be responsible for someone else’s mistake, and even he is, he and the federal government lacks the technological resources to clean up BP’s spill. Incidentally, the first branch, Congress, ought to have some responsibility too.

Like the press and the American people, the White House clearly has not worked out the ethical boundaries of culpability versus responsibility, which it why it has floundered in articulating, exercising, and then defending the proper role of government in handling the present crisis. All this is compounded by the fact that the American media demands and expects a semblance of control even as nature and a complex reality stacks up against one.

While everyone is asking for it, no one knows what leadership means in this situation. If asked, talking heads would each have a different answer. The fact remains that the White House does not have plenary control over corporations and regulatory agencies, nor should it. The President can entreat other oil companies to chip in, but he does not have the authority to command them to do so. The President can pressure BP to be transparent about its operations, but he cannot seize BP’s assets or command a corporation to deploy its assets whichever way the White House directs.

And so the President has made repeated trips to the Gulf to show that whether or not he is in charge, he is at least in the loop and emotionally invested. Empathy, apparently, is a virtue in presidents if not in judges. We desire “activist” presidents, but events do not always permit them.  If we insist on turning leadership into messiahship, we should hardly be surprised at the president’s showmanship.

Given the contested and myriad models of leadership being purveyed on the Left and Right, it behooves the President, at the very least, to decide exactly and then defend what his leadership amounts to. If Obama believes that the buck really stops at the White House, then, as the Left desires, the regulatory power of the federal government must be considerably increased. If he does not want bigger government, then he needs to educate the American people and the Right that the buck really doesn’t stop with government, but at civil society or somewhere else. Right now Obama hasn’t made up his mind, but in this vacillation he is trying to have his cake and eat i

By Purdy, Director of Publicity

Michael Manner and I were English majors at Plattsburgh State before the days of email, before the days of the fax. Indeed, the modern technology of the time was floppy disk computers, and the CD was quickly replacing the cassette tape. Manner and I have kept in touch through the years and when we are together we often argue and bicker like a married couple about love, fear, greed, envy, lust, hypocrisy, music, cats v. dogs, words et al. I think the only thing we ever seem to agree on is that chocolate milk is the greatest invention ever. But enough about me, Manner is a freelance computer consultant living with his mangy, blind cat in Williamsburg Brooklyn, NY. His love of poetry dates back to when dinosaurs roamed the earth and he first heard the words “ugga bugga” uttered by a passing Neanderthal woman. He’s been writing verse since the Iron Age and one day hopes to be cited in the OED. His fave comic book hero is Batman. Despite all this I think is is a truly talented poet and have asked him to post some poems on this blog. You be his judge.

Spill the molten crust.

Spill – Spill vaporic waste.
What slaughters sea beneath a falling crawl –
what burns what cannot burn.
What cracks black and orange like conquered flesh.
What spews bile becomes soil – scarring the offing
Behind smoke white as the whale. There is no difference –
Both create – both destroy – what lives dies. All is wasted;
And all either stone or mist.

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W. Heath Robinson, the English illustrator and master cartoonist, is celebrated in Contraptions, a lavish collection of his work now available from The Overlook Press. Publishers Weekly notes: "American readers will not recognize W. Heath Robinson’s name, but he can best be explained as the British version of American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, a specialist in visualizing absurdly complex combinations of low-tech devices arranged to perform simple tasks. This was also the specialty of cartoonist and illustrator Robinson, who was born a decade earlier, in 1872. It seems that in Britain “a Heath Robertson contraption” means the same thing that a “Rube Goldberg machine” does in the States. Editor Geoffrey Beare points to Robinson’s skills as both artist and satirist. Robinson often depicts scenes from a low angle and gives them an epic scale, endowing his nonsensical machines with an ironic grandeur while mocking the indolence of the modern man, who would rather rely on gadgetry than perform a simple task himself. Through his cartoons Robinson conveys his own sheer joy in his amazing visual imagination. These cartoons are not laugh-out-loud funny, but are consistently inventive and amusing. The reader may find himself in the position of the black cat who turns up in numerous Robinson cartoons, quietly observing the follies of humanity, fascinated by them. "